Feminisms and
Gender Studies
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Feminisms engage with
biological, linguistic,
psychoanalytic, Marxist,
poststructuralist, and cultural
studies as well as ethnic and
race studies, postcolonial
theory, lesbian and gay studies
and gender studies.
Focus upon what is absent
rather than what is present,
reflecting concern with the
silencing and marginalization
of women in a practical culture,
a culture organized in the
favor of men.
"I myself have never been able to find out
precisely what feminism is; I only know that
people call me a feminist whenever I express
sentiments that differentiate me from ... a
doormat ..."--Rebecca West, 1913
Kate Millet is an American feminist writer
and activist. She is best known for her
1970 book Sexual Politics.
In her book, The Second
Sex(1949), Simone de
Beauvoir asked what is
woman, and how is she
constructed differently from
men?
 Answer: she is constructed
differently by men.
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"The Feminine Mystique," first published in 1963.
Friedan "pulled the trigger on history," wrote
futurist Alvin Toffler; feminist admirers refer to it as
"The Book."
 Friedan, who died in 2006, answered that question:
No, it is not all. "What happened to [women's]
dreams?" she asked. What happened to their "share
in the whole of human destiny?" What happened,
according to Friedan, is that women's magazines,
advertisers, and an army of Freudian social
scientists conspired to persuade American women
that the fulfillment of their femininity was their
truest and highest calling.
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Elaine Showalter has
identified three phases of
modern women’s literary
development: the
feminine phase (1840-80),
during which women
writers imitated the
dominant male traditions;
Elaine Showalter
The second one is the
feminist phase (18801920), when women
advocated for their
rights; and the female
phase(1920-present)
emphasizes on the
rediscovery of women’s
texts and women
Today it seems that two
general tendencies, one
emphasizing Showalter’s
biological, linguistic, and
psychoanalytic models,
and the other
emphasizing cultural
model, account for most
feminist theories.
Certain theories may be said to
have an essentialist argument for
inherent feminine traits that
have been undervalued,
misunderstood, or exploited by a
patriarchal culture because the
genders are quite different.
Barbara Kruger: your-body-is-a-battleground-1989
These theories focus
on sexual difference
and sexual politics and
are often aimed at
defining or establishing
a feminist literature
(and culture, history
and so forth) from a
less patriarchal slant.
Opposed to this notion
is constructivist
feminism, which asks
women (and men) to
consider what it means
to be a woman, to
consider that inherently
female traits are in fact
culturally and socially
constructed.
The famous type of monster-madwoman
figure is the madwoman in the attic in
Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre.
Many essentialist feminists make the
argument that female writers often identify
themselves with the literary characters they
detest through such types as the
monster/madwoman figure counterpoised
against an angel/heroine figure.
Like Freud, Jacques Lacan
describes the unconscious as
structured like a language; like
language its power often arises
from the sense of openness and
play of meaning.
Jacques Lacan comes to
the notion of the
Imaginary, a pre-Oedipal
stage in which the child
has not yet differentiated
her- or himself from the
mother and as a
consequence has not
learned language, which is
the Symbolic Order to be
taught by the father.
Hélène Cixous proposes a utopia place, a primeval female space
free of symbolic order, sex roles, otherness, and the Law of Father.
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The feminine “language” of the unconscious
destabilizes sexual categories in the
Symbolic Order of the Father, disrupting the
unities of discourse and indicating its
silencing. French feminists speak of
“exploding” rather than interpreting a sign.
Luce Irigaray
etymologically links
the word “matter”
to “maternity” and
“matrix,” the latter
being the space for
male philosophizing
and thinking.
Luce Irigaray. No mater how
theoretical and abstract
French feminists’ prose
becomes, French feminists do
not astay far from the body.
Julia Kristeva’s latter work moves
toward a more direct embrace of
motherhood as the model for
psychic female health.
Julia Kristeva, in her Desire
in Language, presents a
mother-centered realm of
the semiotic as oppose to
the symbolic. She argues
that the semiotic realm of
the mother is present in
symbolic discourse as
absence or contradiction.
Among the most prominent of feminist minorities are
women of color and lesbians. These feminists practice what is
sometimes called identity politics.
Black feminists have
often turned to the slave
narrative and the
captivity narrative, both
old American forms of
discourse, as of especial
importance to black
women writers.
Bell Hooks is a famous
critic who challenges the
traditional canon.
Chakravorty Gayatri Spivak
Related to the rise of
feminisms among women
of color is the area of
postcolonial studies.
Chakravorty Gayatri Spivak
examines the effects of
political independence
upon subaltern , or
subproletarian women, in
Third World countries.
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The significant source of
constructivist feminism is Marxism,
especially its focus upon the
relations between reading and other
social constructions.
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As Karl Marx argued that all historical
and social developments are determined
by the forms of economic production,
Marxist feminists have attached the
“classist” values of the prevailing
capitalist society of the West as the world
also gradually becomes “globalized.”
Marxist feminists are attacked for
misunderstanding the nature of quality in
art.
Yet Lillian Robinson pointed out that
Feminist criticism must be “ideological
and moral criticism, it must be
revolutionary”(3).
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Teresa de Lauretis and Laura Mulvey
Laura Mulvey’s insight in the “male gaze” which she describes is
based upon
Voyeurism and fetishism, the only available pleasure (usually)
being the male one of looking at women’s bodies for sexual cues.
Ex. In films like Charlie’s Angels (2002) and Monster (2003), and
Kill Bill (2003, 2004)
As a constructivist endeavor,
gender studies examines how
gender is less determined by
nature than it is by culture, and
such a cultural analysis is at the
center of the most complex and
vital critical enterprises at the
present time.
Gender is a construct, “an effect
of language, a culture, and its
institutions.”
Many theorists point out
that what is “normal”
sexually depends upon
when and where one
lives
 Lesbian critics counter their marginalization by considering
lesbianism a privileged stance testifying to the primacy of
women.
 Lesbian critics reject the notion of a unified text, finding
corroboration in poststructuralist and post modernist criticism
and among the French feminists.
 In 1978 the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality was
translated. It argued that homosexuality is a social, medical,
and ontological category invented in the late 19th century and
then imposed on sexual practices that prior to that time
discouraged and punished nonreproductive sexual alternatives.
Queer theory as such postmodern concepts as gender
ambivalence, ambiguity, anf multiplicity of identities have
replaced the more clearly defined sexual values of earlier
generations.
 “Queer” rejects the conventions of Western sexual more
with a commitment only to pleasure.
 Increasingly in the last few years, gay characters, themes,
and programs now appear on all major TV channels and
are the subjects of Hollywood films.
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When Night is Falling -the
exotic can be problematic
it is still cinematically
beautiful and the love
story at its center is
enthralling.
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Better than Chocolate – art,
bookstores, first love, and
musical numbers, with a
wide range of lesbian
identities and an equally
centered trans woman, can
you ask for anything more?
What is most arresting about the
address is its shocking attack upon
female body.
 The speaker seeks to frighten her
into sexual compliance when his
fancy philosophy does not seem
persuasive enough.
 His use of such force is clearest in his
violent and grotesque description of
her body.
 The word vault(a tomb) points
toward her death.
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The connection with penetrating worms from the lines before is in
the wish to ignite her very soul. Attack upon the woman as fortress
and the use of fire to suggest arousal were common tropes in 16th
century love sonnets.
The lady of the poem is subject to being torn, opened up , or
devoured by her admirer.
The feminine is portrayed here as a negative state: she does not
assent: she is not in the poem. It is a poem about power, and the
power lies with the silent female, with the vault or womb- the
negative space of the feminine.
No mention is made of procreation in the poem, nor marriage, nor
even love. It is about sex.
He is also satirizing himself in his outrageous imagistic attempts to
scare her into sex with him.
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Hamlet contends with woman’s body, his mother’s and he
finds its sexual proclivities disgusting, as he rails at her in her
chamber. He loathes himself for being born out of the female
body.
The emphasis upon family relationships and specifically the
politics of sex from the beginning of the play is accompanied
by the emphasis upon political matters of the realm at large.
It is about the politics of masculinity and femininity.
The father-son images in Claudius’s description of matters
between Denmark and Norway are followed by Claudius’s
fatherly behavior to young Laertes and then by the first
appearance of Hamlet.
• Hamlet’s mediation upon his
mother’s faults and his later assalt
upon her are keys to understanding his
torment, but while many critics have
been content to move through the play
seeing Gertrude only through her son’s
angry eyes.
• Hamlet Project upon Gertrude with
these evident dimensions of her
character since Gertrude’s body is the
literal and symbolic ground of all
conflicts in the play; her body and soul
are contested by her son, husband
and countries.
"The Play Scene in Hamlet" by Daniel Maclise ( 1842) Ophelia, Hamlet, and the court watching the "mousetrap" play-within-a-play.
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1851年Millais, Ophelia
Adolph-William Bouquereau,
La Petite Ophélie (TheYoung Ophelia)
Calling Hamlet a “rose”
feminizes him to some
degree. The metaphor
perhaps points out toward
his denial of unconscious
drives and aspects, and her
speech emphasizes his
“feminine” traits of
gentleness, a forgiving
heart, stability, caught as
he is in the throes of his
gendered ego struggle.
Kate Ellis finds that Frankenstein critiques “a bifurcated
social order” that separates “the masculine sphere of
discovery and the feminine sphere of domesticity.”
 Victor’s sin of expropriating the function of the female by
giving “birth” to a child would seem to be a bridging of the
two spheres.
 1. Mary ad Percy, author and editor: Death and birth were
“hideously mixed” in the life of Mary Shelly, notes Ellen
Moers, just as they were in Victor’s workshop of filthy
creation.
 2. Masculinity and femininity in the Frankenstein family:
“masculine persuasion”- the teller in each case is speaking
into a mirror of his own transgression.
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3. I am thy creature…: Victor’s
abandonment of his creation than
for his hubris in having first
created him.
Like Elizabeth’s, the monsterette’s
creation and destruction
dramatize how women function
not in their own right but rather as
signs of and conduits for men’s
relations with other men, simply
counters in the struggle between
Victor and the monster in himself.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne’s portraits of
women go against the literary
conventions of his day. Hawthorne
treated women with more realism and
depth than did most other male writers,
paving the way for the development of
realism and naturalism at the close of the
century in the works of Henry James,
William Dean Howells, Edith Wharton and
Theodore Dreiser; all of these writers
portray women as powerful moral against
rather than one-dimensional moral
objects.
The story centers specifically on Faith
Brown’s husband’s rejection of her;
the tale may be read as a
psychosexual parable of the rejection
of the feminine in favor of a fatherfigure symbolized by the Devil.
 The sexuality inherent in Goodman
Brown’s forest meeting is reinforced
by the repeated mention of the
women who will be there, from
Goody Cloyse and the governor's
wife to the most spent of prostitute.
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Its quilt is an emblem of American women’s culture, as it is
an object of communal construction and female harmony.
In “Everyday Use” Walker poses problems of heritage in
response to the black power movements of the 1960s in
which she grew up, especially the kind of cultural nationalism
that demanded imitation of features of the American past.
“Everyday Use” contains women of all three cycles of history.
Maggie does not know her worth. Dee inhabits the second
cycle: though she seems to reject white society, she fails to
appreciates her own heritage until it becomes fashionable to
do so. The mother prefigures the women of Walker’s third
cycle in her self-reliance and firm sense of connectedness to
her past.
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Walker has made a conscious choice in the story to use
only women; all the men are dead, absent, unnamed.
Maggie’s quiet femininity is upheld in the end when her
mother takes her side. Dee has accepted the things but
not the spirit of heritage
Their mother is the bridge that connects past and future.
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Many ongoing issues generated in the various feminisms and
gender studies are yet to be solved.
The reductiveness of some feminist theory indicates the
radical’s dislike of compromise. Surely somewhere other
than in “political correctness”
We read of a backlash against feminism, particularly on the
political right. But surely the self-consciousness about
gender roles generated by feminism from its earliest days
will continue to inspire new adaptations by women and men
entering the new millennium of literary investigation in
feminisms, gender studies and elsewhere.
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Beauvior, de Simone. The Second Sex. 1949. Reprint.
Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1972.
Butler, Judith. The Judith Butler Reader. Ed, Judith Butler
and Sarah Salih. London: Blackwell, 2004.
Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Sign 1, no. 4
(1976): 875-93.
Hooks, Bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism.
Boston: South End P, 1981.
Humm, Maggie. Feminist Criticism: Women as
Contemporary Critics. Brighton, England: Harvester,
1986.
Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans.
Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985.
Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language. New York: Columbia
UP, 1986.